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With massive popular uprisings sweeping many of the most politically-repressed
nations of the world, Americans are looking toward the upcoming
weekend with a mixture of both fear and dread because it's time,
once again, for the annual Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences Awards ceremony to be televised.

The primary reason for that is because the Academy Awards
ceremony has increasingly become an unbearably abysmal viewing
experience over the past decades, as Hollywood feels compelled to
produce a spectacle that, well, is doomed to
flop, even by our much lower critical standards for award
shows.

But another reason why is because of the anti-American political
bias of many of the movie stars, producers and directors whose
achievements in 2010 will be celebrated this Sunday evening, 27
February 2011, beginning live at 5:00 PM Eastern Time on the ABC
television network with hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway.
Because nothing makes for more a more dreadful viewing experience
than some highly talented movie stars seeking to exploit the
worldwide platform they've been given to show off how much they
care about the ongoing tragedy of "fill-in-the-blank," which
could be fixed if only Americans cared as much as the movie stars
did and demonstrate by their willingness to go far over the
allotted time they've been given for accepting their award.
Assuming they get through thanking the laundry list of people who
worked on their movie that pretty much only they know....

But then we wondered whether Hollywood has a financial motive for
being so apparently anti-American? We've previously found that
anti-U.S. movies tend to flop badly at the U.S.
box office, but what about overseas film markets? How do those
anti-U.S. movies do in those foreign box offices?

We decided to find out! We went back and identified the most
anti-U.S. movies that Hollywood has produced in recent years to
see how they did in both their domestic U.S. market and in
foreign theaters. We then narrowed our selection to consider only
movies set in contemporary times, the issues related to which
foreign audiences would most closely recognize and to which they
would presumably be most receptive to sitting through a 90 minute
long anti-U.S. screed.

The obvious candidates then turned out to be the anti-"War on
Terror" movies that have been produced since 2006. The chart
below shows how these movies performed and the domestic U.S. and
foreign box office, which we then compared with each movie's
estimated production costs.

What we find is that in all but one case, the 2009 Best
Picture-winning Hurt Locker, none of the films
presented in our chart above earned back their production costs
from their U.S. box office receipts.

Released in over 47 countries. Largest box office take in
Spain ($3.046 million) but near tie in France and
French-speaking Northern African nations ($3.014 million).
Combined total accounts for one fifth of total box office.

Best Picture Winner for 82nd Academy Awards.
Released in over 48 countries, biggest foreign box office
in Japan ($7.8 million).

Total

N/A

$276,391,622

34.2%

65.8%

* Total Omits The Kingdom's Box Office Results

Omitting The Kingdom as a control sample, given
its political neutrality, we find that the remaining eight
anti-U.S. films earned a combined U.S. and foreign total of
$276,391,622, with $94,620,951 (34.2%) coming from the U.S. box
office and the remaining $181,770,671 (65.8%) from outside the
U.S. In simple terms, Hollywood earns roughly two dollars
overseas for every one it makes in the U.S. for these anti-U.S.
movies.

The combined total of the estimated production costs for these
eight films is $243,292,000. With the total box office take of
these movies being $276,391,622, we find that Hollywood did
indeed make a profit on these films, earning $33,099,622, or just
shy of a 12% profit margin when compared to their estimated
production costs.

It seems that Hollywood does indeed has a pretty large financial
incentive for being so anti-American. Who knew that good
old-fashioned greed could help explain Hollywood's political
posturing?